I think some part of UI design degraded with the web, where there used to be a clearer distinction between "user data" and "app chrome" areas than there is today.
I'd also like if we could get back to selections of more complex data types at some point and not just treat everything as text. UI toolkits have all kinds of lists and treeviews to model selectable entities, whereas in the browser, there just a single huge wall of text for everything.
I do miss this on an almost daily basis and I have stopped paying for services that force me to use an app without offering a website.
The last instance of this was just a couple days ago when I could not copy a tracking number from an e-commerce app (to then paste it into the shipping company website) but at least this e-commerce company has a web UI so I could rely on that.
Oh and the other one that I miss almost daily is cmd-F / ctrl-F
For macOS is by screencap and selecting on preview, for phones in their respective “ai analysis views” usually long pressing the bottom.
I know it’s a silly flow when it could be selectable straight away, just pointing it out.
They're referring more to things like "you can't copy the text labeling the brush width field in Photoshop" (but you CAN copy the text out of that editable field). It's a part of app design people are extremely lazy with today, as you note.
In any sensibly designed desktop package tracking app that number would've been selectable or copy-able text, like how an email subject is in a desktop email app. (Thunderbird, say.)
(Interestingly, ctrl-f to find is one that many apps/OSes have now borrowed back, with the ability to "find" items in menus through a Help menu -> Search action.)
Good heavens. I boggled at this.
It's not every single day, but probably at least once a week I am frustrated by this, and have been since the rise of PC GUIs -- so, coming up on 35 years now. It was often doable on DOS-era PCs, especially if you had a mouse, or a multitasking environment like DESQview, or best of all, both.
I forgot what desktop application it was, but there was a time that I repeatedly needed to copy texts from a dialog, which didn't support text selection. It frustrated me so much, that I put together a script to do OCR on the dialog.
Supporting complex data types for copy & paste is good; but it is almost trivial to also support plain text copying as a fallback when it already supports copying of other mimetypes. The problem is that some UI has no support of copying in any format at all.
on macOS, anything that uses the OS text input box has emacs keybindings. Universal text editing bindings across the entire OS for all native apps. You lose that with electron, just like you lose a lot of the windows niceties the moment apps stop using win32 and start overriding with their own custom UI toolkits in the name of "branding."
It's part of the big reason computers started to be perceived as difficult to use, and it's not because of the various operating systems. It's because desktop apps stopped respecting the OS and the user, so instead of only needing to learn the operating system's conventions, which would apply to every app built for it, you now have to learn every individual app's quirks and conventions.
The web just continued to make it worse where now every app is it's own little special snowflake.
You've never had to type error code/message instead of copying&pasting? Or use search to jump to a specific settings section?
Don't know if that helps you particularly, but it is great when it works and little-known.
All the more annoying when such years-old fundamentals are broken in all the new "supposedly better" frameworks
I never "read" a desktop application, whereas that is mostly what I use a browser for. And if I can't properly interact with text on a website, then I would likely reach for something else.
Information-oriented desktop apps still do this - any good email client, for instance, should make it trivial to copy a subject line or "to"/"from" address even if it's in the UI chrome.
